”The flipside is that you’re setting up some serious expectations. ‘If you’re picking up a big book,’ says Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Galassi, ‘you’re competing with Tolstoy but you’re also under the shadow of Tolstoy.’ Galassi’s next VLN [Very Long Novel], coming out in June, is an 816-page novel by Stephen Jarvis called Death and Mr. Pickwick. It’s a fictionalized account of the creation of Dickens’s first novel. The catalogue copy opens by calling it ‘a vast, richly imagined, Dickensian work.'”